


tip of the tongue

by dumpsdoods



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: DOESNT MATTER I LOVE HIM, Freaky weird meta shit, Gen, his weird pseudo-character existance, idk man i have weird feelings on felix's existance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-03
Updated: 2019-07-03
Packaged: 2020-06-03 10:29:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19462105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dumpsdoods/pseuds/dumpsdoods
Summary: It was actually only a chance meeting. (Cliche, but Felix has always been a secret sucker for cliche romance novels.) Once he met her, the sense of growing unease he felt with the world only multiplied. Like a word that you can't quite grasp, he felt as if his whole life was teetering on the tip of his tongue.





	tip of the tongue

Felix stands in front of a school in the middle of Paris. 

For years he’d been attending a school on the other side of town, but circumstances change, and he is now standing in front of one Collège Françoise Dupont. 

Felix has a strange irritating sense of deja vu, the same uneasiness he feels when he passes certain alleyways or hovers over certain foods at the store. He pushes it off and makes his way up the steps. It would not do to be late for his first day, inexplicable feelings be damned. He makes his way down the halls, swiftly winding through the clusters of students and expertly tuning out their conversations. Wasting no time on new kid chatter, Felix sets to the task of finding his classroom.

The whole place feels like it should be set up differently than it is. The railing is an inch too short when he grabs for it. The distance between steps on the staircase is just strange enough to make him stumble, feet catching on empty air. 

He spends so much time nearly turning and running into walls in vain attempts to get to hallways that don’t exist that by the time he even nears where his class should be the halls have emptied, leaving him and his stumbling footsteps. 

Eventually, he misjudges where a pillar is and sidesteps suddenly, which puts him in the way of a particularly unfortunate clumsy person. 

In a whirlwind of yelling and colliding, he finds himself on the hard floor, pain in his tailbone promising bruises. He moved to get up, snap at the person who was careless enough to run into him, and go about his day. 

She is a flurry of frantic apologies and waving arms, gathering all her things that had somehow impossibly escaped her book bag. When he dusted himself off, grabbed his schedule as dignified as possible, and turned to tell her off, she had managed to stuff her books into her bag and stood up to meet him (as much as she could with the difference in height). 

“Once again, I’m so, so sorry—!”

Felix is frozen.

His words are stuck in his throat like rocks as she rambled her apologies. 

She was so... familiar. 

She blinked at him anxiously, oblivious to his sudden sense of intense deja-vu. “Are you alright? Did you hit your head? Oh no! Do you need to see a doctor!? I can get you to the nurse! You’re a new kid right? Don’t worry, I know the way! Are you okay?”

Felix was just about as useless as a gaping fish.

He managed to stutter out an “I’m fine,” and almost says her name. 

So close.

He could feel it coming out of his mouth.

But he can’t quite find the right shape for the words. 

“O-oh. Well that’s good.” She smiles at him, relief clear in the slump of her shoulders and he’s seen that smile before hasn’t he— Her face suddenly drains of color, and for a moment she looks just like how Felix feels and he thinks maybe, maybe— 

“Oh no! I’m running late!” She yelps, eyes widening in cartoonish fear. And as fast as her relief came a new set of anxiety and panic sets in, and she’s off in a flash of pink and black. 

Felix can’t move. 

He almost knew her. 

He could almost feel the vibrations that his voice would make to sound her name. 

Almost hear how she would say his, but...

He wasn’t quite there. 

He is left standing alone in the empty hall of a vaguely familiar school.

Unfortunately, not nearly vaguely familiar enough to grant him directions to his first class. 

He rubs his hand across his face and sternly tells himself to get his act together. Since when has he become a stumbling idiot? He glances down and tries to follow the instructions on the thin slip of paper he’s been clutching to his chest. 

—

Felix goes through his day in a confusing haze. 

It’s almost as if you returned to your home after a long stint of travel and find every piece of furniture moved one inch to the left. Or if you looked up and the sky was a slight shade off from how you remembered it, or you reached out for a pen and instead caught empty air. Or when you get stuck in the middle of a sentence, the right word you need on the tip of your tongue but still just out of reach. 

He has no idea if his new classmates can sense his unease or are just put off by his cold demeanor, but nobody volunteers to be his seat partner so he sits himself in a spare table at the back of the class. Coming in late certainly didn’t help his case either. 

He’s never really been a friendly person anyways. The back suits him just fine. 

What’s irritating is that the girl from the hallway is also in the class, and when he slipped in he could feel her eyes on him. He apologized to the teacher for being late, quietly spelled out his name, and made a beeline for the back. All the while very determinedly not looking over at her. 

He tries to concentrate in class, he truly does. But the unease has settled into his bones and makes it difficult to concentrate, so he spends most of the period dragging his eyes from the back of the girl’s head and trying vainly to guess her name. Each guess feels more wrong than the last. 

—

Class comes and goes, and lunch arrives. 

He sits alone, both a new kid and whatever the opposite of a social butterfly is. His efforts to keep his attention off of the girl and her cluster of friends is successful. 

That’s probably why one of them was able to sneak up on him. 

“Hey!”

Felix jumps, every muscle in his body tensed. He turns, and every instinct screams at him that something is very very—

—wrong. 

The boy is blond and a little more on the golden side than Felix is. His vibrant green eyes are friendly where Felix’s are cold and blue. To top it off, he has a bright smile on his face that rivals the sun while Felix’s eternal scowl could probably freeze it over. Where Felix is lacking, this boy shines. 

“I saw that you’re new here— I was new last year, so I thought I should introduce myself. I’m Adrien!” He sticks his hand out, perfectly friendly, perfectly nice. 

Felix very much does not want to touch him. 

As polite as he can be while trying to get him out of his space, Felix scoots back away from his hand and gives him a polite nod. Adrien looks a little hurt. 

Okay, so maybe he wasn’t so polite about it. It’s not exactly his strong suit. 

When he realizes that Felix isn’t going to respond, he drops his hand and scratches the back of his neck awkwardly. “Er... hah, sorry if I’m intruding. You just looked a little lonely over here, and I remembered I saw you in class today, so I thought you might want some company! It sure is hard being a new kid, right?”

When Felix still doesn’t say a word, Adrien frowns. “Ah.. What’s your name?” A beat. “Can you, uh, talk?”

“Yes,” Felix says curtly. 

“Oh, sorry!” He gives Felix a perfectly sorry face. 

Felix says nothing. 

“Well, I’ll see you later then-?” He pauses, clearly waiting for a name, or at least a farewell.

Felix stares. 

“Uh, yeah, see you in class.” And Adrien makes a beeline for his friends. 

The relief of getting the unnerving boy out of his space is enough to make him slump out of his practiced posture. As much as he’d like to not think about his abnormally strong reaction to a perfectly nice kid (too nice), he curiously watches where Adrien goes. 

Straight to the girl and her cluster of friends.

The way she blushes and leans towards him when he stands next to her makes it clear how she feels. Felix is surprised by the surge of annoyance that rushes over him. 

Why should he care about this random girl and boy? Why is she so damn familiar?

He jerks his head down to his lunch when they turn their heads towards him and pretends he can’t feel their eyes boring into him. 

The rest of lunch is spent without any more unwanted attention, and he passes the time by making more halfhearted guesses at the girl’s name. 

—

The rest of the day is pretty much the same, although he can feel the students becoming more hostile to his presence. It seems like his cold response to Adrien was not well received, and gossip clearly travels fast in this school. 

At one point, he tries to get to the library, a place of safety. He mindlessly turns a corner and finds himself in the boys locker room. 

Very much not the library. 

Aware of the sudden stares, Felix backtracks quickly, and gets up the courage to ask a passing student where the library is. She tells him, bewilderingly, that it’s on the other side of the building. 

He thanks her, polite, turns away, and resists the urge to slam his head into the nearest wall. 

—

The day ends without fanfare or goodbyes and Felix is suddenly at the door to the school again. 

He can’t wait to get out the door but he also feels compelled to stay, so he stands outside the doorway as students filter out, staring up at the heavy droplets of rain. 

Somehow, the rain feels… forced. 

“Oh!” He hears a squeak from behind him, and that same girl from earlier nearly avoids running into him. 

He glances over at her for a moment before darting his eyes away. He prepares himself to dash through the rain before she calls out. 

“Wait!”

He freezes and slowly turns back towards her. 

She’s standing with an umbrella in one hand, her gaze both curious and guarded. 

The hair on the back of his neck stands on end from the familiarity of it all. 

Felix tries to pull himself together, pick up the pieces. 

She sticks her hand out to him. “My name is—“

In a flash, her name hits him with a punch to the gut.

“Marinette,”

she introduces herself politely. 

He looks down at her hand, dumbly, reeling from her name rattling in his head and making any coherent thought impossible. 

“...Felix.” He shakes her hand, the shape of it fitting easily in his. The contact is over swiftly as she ducks her hand out of his grip and curls it around her umbrella. 

“I just wanted to say sorry for running into you like that today. And sorry if my friend was bothering you over lunch today.” She frowned. “He thinks he might have scared you.”

She clearly doesn’t think he did, with how she’s eyeing him, and he figures he probably hurt poor golden boy’s feelings. 

He thinks some rather uncharitable thoughts of her “friend” that he most likely didn’t deserve, but shrugs nonetheless. 

“It’s fine,” is all he says. Marinette’s frown deepens, and unfolds her umbrella before stepping out into the pattering rain. 

“Well... I’ll see you tomorrow. Felix.” She gives him an awkward wave, and off she goes.

Felix is once again left standing on his own. He watches her shelter under the black umbrella, heading her own way.

The school is empty when he steps out into the rain.

**Author's Note:**

> I certainly have some weird feelings about this- yknow, i wrote a version w bridgette hastily after watching Your Name, but now i’ve been imbued with the felinette propaganda, and although i do like the other version i wrote, i’m unsure of it. thank u felinette server <3 this one goes out to all of you. I know i’ve said i’m not a writer- but when i do write, i write some weird ass shit.
> 
> You could think of this as in universe, some shit happened a la clash of noir au (check out nobodyfamous on tumblr! i love it with all my heart, i wish i could get my act together as much as that wonderful au), or as some weird look on how once you’re cut out of something, it keeps going, and eventually it comes to a point where you no longer fit into the picture anymore. 
> 
> On a lighter note, I certainly find Felix’s strange limbo existence fascinating! The nature of storytelling and how people relate to stories is so goddamn cool, you guys. I could talk about it all day, but I’ll spare you all an essay length authors note lmao


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